I'm looking for a way around using flash for video's on a site. Does anybody have any suggestions for something that might work across multiple browsers that isn't flash based? HTML5 seems promising, but I need something with more browser acceptance.

I'm trying to avoid having to serve up difference video's based on user agents.

4 Answers
4

LongTail video player is another Flash based one but it also has support for HTML5 as a fallback. It's pretty easy to implement and will do all the user-agent detection for you

What are your actual requirements for a non-Flash delivery? Are a lot of your users on mobile devices?

There actually isn't any single delivery method out there (or very one would be using it!) but at present a Flash player with a HTML5 fallback is the best way to go in most cases. LongTail or Flowplayer should help to make that easier for you

There is a small percentage of mobile and iPad user to the site, but it adds up to a larger number of page views based on the site's traffic. I'll check out your link, but may very well just do the detection myself and avoid a third party. Thanks!
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PeachyFeb 2 '11 at 23:41

Unfortunately there isn't much else. If not for flash, you'll need some other plugin. HTML 5 is designed to solve (amongst others) this problem, but we're not there yet. HTML 5 video support is not present in all browsers, and they are still fighting over which video encoding to use.

For now, flash is the best way to go, except for iPhone/iPad. The only other real option is SilverLight.

You might want to look into Flowplayer. I know it looks like they are flash-based but it seems they have added support for non-flash based options, so they may work on devices such as the ipad or iphone.

One additional solution is using Cortado, a Java-based media player (it's the old player that Wikipedia used).

Agreed with the above posts though - Flash with fallback to HTML5 is just a better solution, and trying to stay away from it is a disservice to your users. It's easier for people to have a valid Flash player installed than to have an updated Java or an HTML5-compatible browser (not to mention encoding in different formats...)